2019

Four students in the Joint Ph.D. Program in Education (JDP) offered by San Diego State University and Claremont Graduate University recently received $170,000 in funding from the Office of the Provost to bring programming designed to improve the experience of Black students to SDSU during the spring semester.

For much of her childhood, Dr. Estella Chizhik attended predominantly white schools and was taught by exclusively white teachers. That was until her father, a U.S. Army officer, was transferred to Fort McPherson in Atlanta. He decided to send Estella to attend 7th grade at Sylvan Elementary, a public school in the predominantly black neighborhood near the base.

Tears were flowing as Dr. Marissa Vasquez read the acceptance letter. The assistant professor in the Department of Administration, Rehabilitation and Postsecondary Education (ARPE) learned last month that she was named to the Faculty Fellows of the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education (AAHHE). It’s a great honor and opportunity bestowed by an organization that once helped instill Vasquez’s belief that she could become a professor. But that wasn’t the reason for her tears.

In our Student Spotlight series, Mariela Contreras — a credential student in the Department of Dual Language and English Learner Education — has a passion for music, teaching and keeping the Spanish language alive in schools.

Dr. Nellie Tran remembers being a new faculty member at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell and seeing a Cambodian American student walk down the hallway outside her office, only to stop in her tracks.

Faculty in the Department of Administration, Rehabilitation and Postsecondary Education received two U.S. Department of Education Rehabilitation Services Administration grants to help SDSU address the need for qualified vocational rehabilitation counselors.

Dr. Melissa Navarro Martell (’18) began her career as a dual-language educator, inspired by passions to help others and speak out against injustice.

You may know Dr. Regina R. Brandon as an associate professor in the Department of Special Education where she’s the coordinator of the Preliminary Special Education, Mild/Moderate Credential Program. But did you also know she’s a popcorn-loving world traveler who pledges allegiance to Raider Nation? Find out more about Regina in this edition of 7 Things You Didn’t Know About Faculty and Staff!

A Bay Area elementary school teacher and graduate of San Diego State University has made national news after a video of her singing the hit Lizzo song “Truth Hurts” — modified with inspirational lyrics — with her students became a viral sensation. The video of DorothyHoney Mallari, a 2011 liberal studies graduate and a second grade teacher at Los Medanos Elementary School in Pittsburg, first hit social media in early November.